Electronic voting: isn’t it about time we had a collective fit of national hysteria?

For some time now, Slashdot has been covering the growing concerns over …

For some time now, Slashdot has been covering the growing concerns over electronic voting systems from vendor Diebold. (Actually, some googling reveals that Scoop has been the one really covering every aspect of the Diebold stories.) Diebold's machines, which are already in use in districts in a number of states, are alleged to have absolutely horrible security, with some holes reportedly persisting in the systems for many years after they were first reported. Furthermore, the systems are closed, proprietary, rely at least partially on security through obscurity, and Diebold refuses to disclose such essential details as how the votes are counted.

Slashdot's latest blurb on the topic is enough to make your hair stand on end. The story links to a Wired piece on Diebold's latest problems, as well as to an even more infuriating article on Democracy Now!. Some excerpts from the latter piece:

A recent article by Julie Carr Smyth in The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the head of Diebold is also a top fundraiser for President Bush's re-election. In a recent fund-raising letter Diebold's chief executive Walden O'Dell said he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." "I think the question that this has raised is, has he crossed the line?," said The Plain Dealer?s Smyth on Democracy Now!...

?Basically what we have is a company that is giving money, hand over fist and helping in campaign strategizing for a particular political party at the same time as making the machines that count the votes,? said Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century.

Harris told Democracy Now!: ?We now know that the machines that they're making that count the votes are not secure from tampering. And add to that, we've got a situation where everything inside the machines is secret, we're not allowed the see how they count the votes. So this is not an acceptable situation.?

According to Harris, a study of the campaign contributions made by Diebold and its employees revealed an unusual pattern: Hundreds of thousands of dollars were being funneled to a few Republican candidates with very little to any other party.

Harris says that Diebold?s electronic voting machines are wide open to tampering. ?There?s actually several different methods that we've been looking at. One of the first things you do when you look at any kind of fraud is look what they tell you not to look at,? she said. Harris managed to obtain the source code that is used in Diebold?s electronic voting system simply by searching the Internet. Harris told Democracy Now! that she recently uncovered another file on the Diebold site that she says ?may very well be the smoking gun that brings this thing down.? The file, she claims, proves that Diebold has the ability to keep track of election results as they come in. More concerning she says technology exists that would allow Diebold to alter election results.

Regardless of what you think of the obviously anti-Republican slant of Democracy Now!, the two journalists interviewed for the story raise a number of points that speak to issues of accountability and openness that sit at the very core of our democracy. In fact, the first misguided idiot to dismissively holler "conspiracy theory!" in the news comments section deserves to have his or her patriotism seriously called into question.

And speaking of questions, the number one question on my mind--and this was raised in the Slashdot comments section also--is why this story hasn't absolutely caught fire in the mainstream press. Where are Newsweek, Time, the NYT, and a dozen other publications for which this should be front page news? If a free and independent press is supposed to be the guardian of democracy, then our national press corps is sleeping on the job if they don't pick this up and run with it. We hear about potentially "sexed up" intelligence reports on Iraq every day, but what about potentially sexed up domestic election results? Could we maybe stop fixating on the war for like one week and instead have a big round of "electronic voting: the end of democracy?" stories? As a controversy it might not have quite as much intrinsic commercial appeal as Mel Gibson's Jesus movie, but I have faith that our press corps could spice it up enough to get people at least temporarily riled up over it.